


better off as friends

by smolqueernerds



Category: The Ever Afters Series - Shelby Bach
Genre: F/F, Gen, I wrote all of this on my phone so please judge my many formatting errors lightly, implied Lena LaMarelle/Rory Landon/Chase Turnleaf, slight Kyle Zipes/Lancer Davis, true wlw and mlm solidarity does exist it's these two
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-22
Updated: 2017-06-22
Packaged: 2018-11-17 07:18:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,730
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11270685
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolqueernerds/pseuds/smolqueernerds
Summary: “Gay best friends?” Kyle jokes.“Gay best friends,” Lena answers seriously.They shake on it.(That's it, that's the fic.)





	better off as friends

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lulla_lunekjaer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lulla_lunekjaer/gifts).



It's been building for a while, this thing between them. With every offhand joke about the two of them from other Characters - "Where's Kyle?" "Well, if you find Lena, there's Kyle" - and every time they brush against each other while exchanging tools or leaning over one another to get at a trouble spot on one invention, the balance shifts again.  
But it comes to a head the day he tries to kiss her.  
They're sitting side by side on the floor of her laboratory, backs against the wall. Lena's talking a million miles a minute, thinking aloud to try and figure out where the pressurized spring-loaded bow went wrong, and so she doesn't hear Kyle's shuddering breaths or see him leaning over until his mouth suddenly mashes into hers.  
It's a hard, painful, ugly clash of teeth and lips, and Lena jerks her head back like she's been stung, only moments before Kyle does the same.  
"I can't like you like that," they both say, the edges of the words blurring together as they spill out of their mouths.  
Then; "Wait, you too?"  
A moment of eyeing each other, expressions hovering somewhere between amusement, shock, and wariness.  
Lena asks, slowly, carefully, the question she wishes she didn't have to; "Why'd you kiss me?"  
"Why'd you pretend you had a crush on me?" Kyle shoots back. For the first time in Lena's memory, his words are meant to cut.  
And they do, for Lena's long-suppressed guilt comes bubbling up immediately. "I never meant to! I lied to Rory about it in sixth grade and then I had to act the part and I meant to tell her I'd gotten over you eventually but then I realized I'd have to pretend it was someone else sooner or later and it was easier to just keep pretending it was you."  
"Why'd you have to pretend at all?"  
"Why did you?" Her voice rises to a sudden yell. "Nobody made you ask to dance with me at the ball or help me with inventions or tell me how smart I was- "  
"I could have done all that to be nice!"  
"But you didn't," Lena says, shoving down the voice in her mind chastising her for asserting a hypothesis based on inconclusive data, because she knows she's right, somehow. "You knew it would make people think you had a crush on me and you did it anyway. You did it because it made them think that."  
Silence hangs in the air.  
"Not only because of that," Kyle says softly, his voice shaking a little as he stares at his hands. "You really are amazing, Lena. I mean, you know that. Everybody knows that. You're the coolest person I've ever met, and - if I was going to like any girl, it'd be you. I thought, if I tried hard enough, it could be you. But I just can't-"  
"I know," Lena says. "I tried with you too. I knew I couldn't do it, couldn’t like any boy like that, but I kept trying anyway. Like I’d get a different result the second or tenth or fiftieth time. But the data isn’t changing.”  
Kyle laughs, a little wetly, and wipes his nose on his sleeve. “So what do we do now?”  
Lena bites her lip. “What’s your stance on friendship?”  
“Gay best friends?” Kyle jokes.  
“Gay best friends,” Lena answers seriously.  
They shake on it.

There's a lavender door that opens into the janitor’s closet of a movie theater in Portland - it’s not technically illegal, since a rule is yet to be made against bypassing the ticket desk through teleportation. Still, Lena leaves cash on their seats afterward, and Kyle doesn't mention that another moviegoer probably pockets the bills before any theater employee has a chance to come by. They watch whatever movies are playing that week; sci-fi and rom-coms and horror, grabbing each other's hands at the sad and scary parts and ignoring the people around them who smile and whisper confidential, unoriginal things about young love to each other.

  
For days when the light in Kyle’s eyes is unmistakably dull and Lena’s inventions are exploding more violently than usual, there’s a black door with silver filigree that only Sarah Thumb could comfortably enter. If you crawl through the tunnel that lies behind it, you’ll eventually emerge through a trapdoor onto a rooftop in Prague (at least, it looks like Prague, even if the sun is always setting and the temperature is always around 60 degrees Fahrenheit and there are never any people around but sometimes it looks like there are gargoyles flying in the distance). They sit more or less side by side, though Kyle swings his legs over the edge while Lena maintains a reasonable distance. One of them speaks into the wind about idiotic brothers or overbearing sisters or old-fashioned parents or strict grandparents or the unbearable heteronormativity of fairytales, and the other one stares into the unchanging colors of the sky, politely pretending not to hear any sniffles or cracking voices.

Once, just once, they go to a parade, streak their faces with multicolored paint and dance in the streets and feel like they are two tiny parts of a much greater and more powerful whole. Lena washes off her face in the nearest public bathroom afterward, and the slickness on her fingers is nothing like blood but she makes the mental comparison anyway.

Eventually, hightailing it to an out-of-the-way location every time starts to get old, so they make some modifications. After the stealthy implementation of a slight soundproofing spell, an alarm enchantment that tells Lena when anyone comes within fifty feet of her room, and a more secure lock on her door, they’re free to sprawl out on Lena’s bed as she paints Kyle’s nails and listens to him complain about Lancer Davis, the flop of his hair over his eyes and the way his limbs twist when he dances.  
“You never talk about girls,” Kyle says suddenly, sitting up and twisting to look at her. “I mean, you don’t have to. But you could, if you wanted.”  
Lena looks at him disbelievingly, because while he may not have her photographic memory, it seems unlikely that he has forgotten every one of the nineteen times she has tried to describe the bubbling warmth in her stomach that Rory’s laugh unfailingly produces.  
Kyle scrunches up his nose, as he usually does when he’s searching for the right words to use. “I mean, you do talk about girls, obviously, but, um, it's always very G-rated?” A blush colors his cheeks. “And I don't want you to feel like you can’t talk to me about….other stuff, too. If you want to talk about it.”  
“I - um. I’m ace,” Lena says, staring down at her nail brush. “Asexual. I like girls, I like looking and talking and maybe I’d like kissing and living together and adopting parakeets, but I don’t want - other stuff.”  
“Oh, cool, okay,” Kyle says, and the next week, he brings her a bracelet with beads in gray, black, and purple. She keeps it in a box beside her bed, taking it out every once in awhile and reminding herself that nobody at EAS is likely to know what the color scheme means, that you can easily be ace and heteroromantic, that plenty of Puritan influence has seeped into the Tales over the years and maybe people would just see it as admirable chastity or something else mildly misguided but not all that bad.  
She still puts it back in the box every time.

"Kyle kissed me," Lena tells Rory, remembering the brush of his lips against her forehead, and she can't keep her eyes from filling with tears. "And the whole time, I kept thinking about how I'll never feel him holding my hand." She thinks about the pressure of his fingers in hers, about how easily her new golden fingers could crush every bone in his hand, about how this is the saddest and scariest part of all and there’s no one she can hold on to anymore.  
"Oh, Lena," Rory breathes, and Lena thinks _if I die someday my last thought will be_ ‘at least I can stop loving Rory Landon now.’

Three weeks after the war ends, Kyle and Lena stage a breakup. Kyle outlines various unspeakably dramatic plans for it, but eventually Lena convinces him that backup singers and glitter cannons are extremely expensive, a public screaming match would be suspiciously uncharacteristic for both of them, a slap from a metal hand would break his nose at the very least, and anything that cast either of them in too negative a light would definitely result in retribution (from Chase and Lena if he were the vilified party, from Connor and Kevin if she were). He sighs in a manner that indicates he knew perfectly well how things would go all along, and they both tell their friends that it was a mutual parting of ways, would have happened even if she hadn’t lost her hands and gained eternal life. Rory shows up at her house that night with an armful of ice cream and a shopping bag filled with movies with absolutely no trace of romance, and Chase regales her with Faerie proverbs about the doomed nature of love that she’s almost positive he’s making up on the spot, and they both invite her onto all of their dates for a week and a half before she convinces them that third wheeling is in no way going to make her feel better. And all the while there’s a gnawing little voice inside saying that sooner or later she'll have to tell them the truth.  
Someday, Lena tells herself. But not yet.  
It’s not like it really matters now, anyway, now that she has too much future of her own to be able to build one with anyone else.

Three months after the war ends, Kyle asks Lancer Davis out under the Tree of Hope. Lena builds him a very small glitter cannon for the purpose, and when Lancer asks “Oh my god, can I kiss you right now?” and grabs Kyle’s lapels at his eager affirmative, she starts the applause, her claps ringing like a bell through the hollering crowd.  
“Bisexuality exists,” Kyle and Lena tell anyone who asks how on earth Kyle could date a _girl_ and then a _boy_ and what does it _mean_ , and it’s a true statement. Plenty of people are bisexual. Kyle just doesn’t happen to be one of those people, and they never explicitly say that he is, after all. You know what they say about assumptions.

Three years after the war ends, Lena figures out a way to reverse the golden apple’s spell. Well, maybe not reverse, per se. Her metal hands are lighter and more flexible, now, but she couldn't find a way to give them nerve endings and they'll never pass for flesh. As for her age? She’ll have to brew and drink a certain potion every month and there's a slight chance that her risk of skin cancer has increased by 25%, but barring unforeseen complications, any Canon member hasn't accumulated more years than their body can naturally hold will now be able to age like a normal Character, if that should be their wish.  
Lena drinks her first dose of the potion, flexes her fingers, and feels the weight of eighteen settle into her bones. It's not all that bad, though she'd hoped to be taller by now.  
She throws on some clothes stolen from her grandmother’s closet, slips a dragon scale into her skirt pocket and rhymes herself invisible. The door leading to Chase and Rory’s university is as close to her laboratory as it can get, but she can't risk being caught - she'd be stopped and questioned and Chase and Rory deserve to be the very first ones to know.  
Her hand trembles for the first time in years as she turns the knob and steps through into the closet of Rory’s dorm room, thinking the usual ironic thoughts about the appropriateness of its location.  
When Lena steps out of the closet, there’s Rory, hunched over a computer muttering softly to herself. Lena allows herself exactly six seconds of fond gazing before letting the closet door swing shut and clearing her throat.  
Rory leaps up, nearly upsetting her desk chair in the process, and spins around to face her. “Lena, hey! What's up? Wait.” Her eyes widen. “Oh, my god, _Lena_.”  
Remembering the “breaking good, bad, or questionable news” unit from her online public speaking class, Lena takes a deep breath and says “I figured out how to undo the golden apple’s spell, and I’m a lesbian, and my hands are better too but they're not fully-”  
Rory crosses the room to her in two steps and raises her hand to within an inch of Lena’s face. “Can I touch you? Is this okay?”  
More than okay, Lena thinks, but she only says “Yes.”  
Rory’s fingers map out Lena’s cheekbones and run down her nose, stroke the sides of her neck before coming to rest on her shoulders, gripping her tightly as a miracle. “You're so tall now.”  
Lena huffs. “Oh, please. My height has increased by approximately three inches. I'm surprised you even noticed the difference, you ridiculous giant.”  
“Hey!” Rory protests, but her faux indignance melts almost immediately into a blinding smile. “God, I can't believe this. You actually did it. I mean, I _can_ believe it, you're brilliant and a genius and I always believed in you but oh my god you _actually did it_ and why didn't you tell us?”  
“About being gay?”  
Rory shakes her head. “I meant about undoing the spell, because you didn't exactly say you were close to a breakthrough or anything, but actually, yeah, the gay thing too. I mean, that's obviously okay, that's awesome, and it's none of my business or anyone's if you don't want it to be, but - why wouldn't you tell me, and Chase? We’ve been your best friends for years.”  
“Well, on the spell front, I didn't want to get your hopes up - or my hopes up - if it didn't work. This was, like, my sixth variation on a basic theme and I didn't really have all that much confidence in it for a while. And I guess I kind of wanted to...surprise you? Surprise everyone?”  
“You dork.”  
“Yeah. And, um, on the lesbian thing…”  
“Wait, did you not know until recently? Is that why you didn't tell us?” Rory claps a hand over her mouth. “I'm an indoor, I'm skip sorrow.”  
“What? Take your hand off your mouth, I can't hear you.”  
“I'm an idiot, I'm so sorry.”  
Lena forces a smile and looks down at her hands. “Um, actually, no. I've known since I was eleven. I mean, I’ve done a lot of self-examination since then and figured a lot of stuff out, but eleven was the first time I fell for a girl. That was the catalyst.”  
“And here I thought you were pining for Kyle when we were eleven,” Rory says, shaking her head. “Wait. Who was the girl you fell for? I mean, you don't have to tell me, it's totally cool if-”  
“Right. Well. That's the thing.” Summoning up her courage, Lena looks Rory in the eyes. “That girl was you, Rory. I was in love with you when we were eleven, and as far as I can tell, I still am. Maybe I always will be, and I'm content with that possibility, and l will always want to be friends with you no matter what and-”  
“Lena,” Rory says, one of her hands leaving Lena’s shoulder to come up and float an inch from her cheek. “I don't want to interrupt, but can I kiss you? Is that okay?”  
“More than okay with me,” Lena says hoarsely, “but what about Chase.”  
“Bisexuality exists,” Rory says with a grin as wide as the sky, “and so does polyamory. And I promise, promise, promise that it's okay with him and me and we can work everything out later and it will be awesome, but can you please be kissing me now?”  
“I think that could be arranged.”

(When she texts Kyle a picture of Rory's lips on hers, her phone fairly explodes.)

**Author's Note:**

> I had a slightly better ending, but I can't figure out how to insert images into ao3 fic. So, minimalism.
> 
> You're really sure Chase is okay with this?"  
> "Yeah, actually? This might sound weird, but when I told him I was bi he said 'sweet, I'm pretty sure Lena's a lesbian so none of us are cishet' and I asked if you really were or if he was joking and he said 'Trust me, if she liked guys she would have fallen for me at some point and we'd be a ridiculously dramatic love triangle right now. But if you ever want to date Lena, and she wants to date you, that'd be pretty chill, and did I mention that I love you both so much I want to cry sometimes?'"  
> "You're right, that does sound weird."  
> "In fairness, I found out afterward that he'd just been stabbed by a manticore, and you know how he gets during blood loss."
> 
> Me: why don't I write a nice, wholesome, platonic Kylena fic exploring their relationship wholely outside of the story's canon yet within canon's timeline, but also with a little unrequited Rory/Lena angst, for Gritty Realism  
> My brain: hmmm yes interesting beginning but why don't you break the flow by reinterpreting one canon event through Rory's eyes, then pick up after OEAE with an OOC snippet or two amusing only to yourself, and top it off with your most rushed and unrealistic portrayal of Triumvirate polyamory yet  
> Me: this is the only way I'm going to get this fic finished, isn't it  
> My brain: how did you know 
> 
> This is a gift for @lulla_lunekjaer, even though she should rightly be its co-creator, because I love her too much to make her claim ownership to the trash heap I haphazardly constructed out of our well-loved mutually conceived Gay Friendship headcanons.


End file.
